The present invention relates generally to storage systems and, more particularly to a method of storage array with frame forwarding capability to reduce the complexity of an IT (Information Technology) platform system having a large number of hardware devices.
An IT platform system has plural hardware devices such as one or more server machines, networking switches, and storage subsystems. Typically, an IT platform system has a server machine such as an x86 server or a UNIX server; a networking switch such as an Ethernet switch, an IP router, or an FC switch; and a storage subsystem such as a shared SAN (Storage Area Network) storage subsystem or a NAS (Network Attached Storage) subsystem. In order to provide the required computing resources to business applications such as email, ERP, database, or the like, the IT platform system must be designed and deployed properly by a highly trained IT system designer.
Recently, the IT platform system has become very complex. High demands of computing resources from business applications make IT platform systems increasingly bigger. As a result, the IT platform system needs more and more hardware devices. Even a highly trained IT system designer finds it very difficult to design and deploy a huge IT platform system properly. One of the problems is that the IT system designer has to know the various hardware devices such as x86 server, UNIX server; Ethernet switch, IP router, FC switch; SAN storage subsystem, NAS, and so on. As the number and complexity of these hardware devices increase, the difficulty of design and deployment also increase. Another problem is that the IT system designer needs to consider numerous restrictions such as physical space (server rack, data center), power consumption, and the like, and must take into account the interoperability among the many hardware devices. Cabling between hardware devices has also become a problem when the IT platform system is increasingly huge.
Many IT platform systems are encountering the problems of network resource constraint, especially between the server machine and the storage subsystem. Typically, the server machine and the storage subsystem connect to each other by using SAN (FC, iSCSI, FCoE). In this case, many server machines connect to SAN switches, and the storage subsystems also connect to the SAN switches. Recently, however, the Flash storage device has been becoming more popular. The Flash storage device would become an alternative to the hard disk drive because of high performance. Utilizing Flash storage device will require more networking resources between the server machine and the storage subsystem. The SAN switches tend to become the bottleneck, and to avoid the bottleneck would require many SAN switches and HBAs (Host Bus Adapters).